Now that we know Google was a big loser in the 700MHz spectrum auction, many bloggers are acting like they knew it all along.  But the truth is, when we predicted that Google wouldn’t win any spectrum, there were only a small handful of people who agreed with us.  When I explained that Google's involvement was a PR stunt, most people were still fantasizing about the possibilities of Google-owned spectrum.

But it appears there is still some education to do.  The normally sober Ars Technica is now calling the loss a “coup” and claiming that Google is “ecstatic”.  As we explained, the PR stunt had rather limited success.  And in fact it appears to be worse than that.  We are seeing now that the much-vaunted open access requirements are open to serious interpretation.  I’m as much in favor of network neutrality as anyone, and I would love to report that Google’s PR stunt moved the needle significantly, but that simply wouldn’t be true.

Now Ars Technica and others are predicting that the latest effort, which includes Microsoft, Google, Intel and others, will have a serious impact on network neutrality.  That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.  And while Ars Technica can be forgiven for wishful thinking, I can’t say the same about others.  Once again, we are seeing reporters speculate that Google wants to get into network access business.  I already explained why Google doesn’t want to be in that business.

Rich user experiences are going mainstream on a wider variety of devices and putting pressure on web standards.  This trend is changing the face of the web as we know it, and we've covered this trend extensively here and at the MIX conferences.  But there is another trend that is also changing the web forever, and Ray Ozzie's keynote at MIX08 was a shot across the bow regarding Microsoft's response to this seismic shift.

In his keynote, Ray talked about the "mesh", and the inexorable shift of services into large centralized data centers.  We announced some cloud storage services, and discussed our philosophy of keeping control at the edges.  This is really just the beginning, and we'll be having a deep conversation with the industry over the next year.

To kick off the conversation here on MIX Online, I asked Greg Linden to share his broad industry perspective about some of these topics.  Greg led development of Amazon's ground-breaking recommender systems, created Findory, and recently joined Microsoft to work on some top-secret incubation projects.  He continues to run the popular "Geeking with Greg" blog, where he riffs on large-scale centralized computing, data mining, and "collective intelligence".

Just a few of the topics we talked about:

• Is MapReduce/Hadoop really as good as SQL?
• What are the limits of social search?
• What good is collective intelligence, anyway?
• Will all of the world get sucked into one or two datacenters?